The site integrates the latest data the federal responders have about the oil spill’s trajectory with fishery area closures, wildlife data and place-based Gulf Coast resources — such as pinpointed locations of oiled shoreline and current positions of deployed research ships — into one customizable interactive map.

NYTimes Map – Looks like a very comprehensive site that includes maps of where oil is and where oil has made landfall along with other information about efforts to stop the leak, effects on wildlife, and more.

Toxic chemicals are everywhere

Many toxic chemicals are found in the bodies of virtually every person on the planet, even those living in remote communities. In fact, the blood of nearly every American contains hundreds of chemicals, including those used in flame retardants, food packaging and even rocket fuel.

The “I Am Not a Guinea Pig” campaign is aimed at helping to ensure that the voices of millions of Americans who are concerned about and affected by exposures to untested and unsafe chemicals are heard as Congress begins the first serious effort to overhaul the 34-year-old TSCA.

The campaign’s goal is to engage Americans across the country to push for substantive reform of our toxic chemicals law.

To encourage support for a strong bill, EDF has joined with other members of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition that EDF helped found that includes over 200 health and environmental groups representing 11 million people across the nation. Key coalition partners in EDF’s campaign include:

The focus of the conference was clearly on diagnosis and treatment with little to no discussion of environmental factors. Certainly screening, diagnosis, and treatment are critical, but shouldn’t we try to prevent as much as we can?

More from the Yahoo story

Dr. Michelle Holmes of Harvard University, who has studied cancer and lifestyle factors, said people might wrongly think their chances of getting cancer depend more on their genes than their lifestyle.

“The genes have been there for thousands of years, but if cancer rates are changing in a lifetime, that doesn’t have much to do with genes,” she told The Associated Press in a phone interview from Cambridge, Mass.

Could perhaps increasing exposure to substances in the environment change rates in a lifetime? That doesn’t have much to do with genes either. Though if you’re being exposed to chemicals that interfered with how your genes were turned on and off before you were born, or are interfering with that now, perhaps it does.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. In Europe, there were about 421,000 new cases and nearly 90,000 deaths in 2008, the latest available figures. The United States last year saw more than 190,000 new cases and 40,000 deaths.

Tara Beaumont, a clinical nurse specialist at Breast Cancer Care, a British charity, noted that three of the major risk factors for breast cancer — gender, age and family history — are clearly beyond anyone’s control.

What about environmental exposure to chemicals?

IARC, on its World Cancer Day page, notes that it has an active program in the identification of carcinogenic risks. The IARC Monographs identify environmental factors—including chemicals, complex mixtures, occupational exposures, physical and biological agents, and lifestyle factors—that can increase the risk of human cancer.

In other words, there are several other environmental factors besides lifestyle that have been identified. See the articles below for examples of how environmental factors could be contributing to breast cancer.

While the advice to eat less and exercise more is good (in fact, given that no one really has much direct control over environmental exposures that advice is probably even more important), I find it disturbing that the major risk factors cited in news stories seem to be reduced to diet, lifestyle, gender, age, and family history (that is, genetics), leaving environment out of the picture.

Why is that? Because it’s easier to blame cancer victims than to confront companies and industries that sell us products that release substances that can mess with our health and who continue to release carcinogens and endocrine disruptors into our air and water? (I’ll refer you again to the TEDX site, “Prenatal Origins of Cancer” for more information on that.)

Another perspective

In a post “do patients need doctor navigators to use the internet?”, David Collins discusses a March 25 New England Journal of Medicine opinion piece titled “Untangling the Web — Patients, Doctors, and the Internet” in which the authors “expressed a lot of concerns about how the internet is putting patients in touch with a lot of questionable information about disease” and about how they thought that changes the doctor-patient relationship in an adverse way. (While they do raise some good points about the quality of some of the information on the Internet, I tend to agree with Collins.)

The reason I’m citing that here is the following statement from his post:

When I joined cancer public health in the ’70s the medical community almost universally rejected the idea that food and nutrition had anything to do with the prevention of cancer. People who talked about a relation between nutrition and cancer were sneered at and called the “fruits and nuts” crowd. Thirty-five years later as I approached retirement I had to chuckle inwardly many times about the current enthusiasm for the view that diet and nutrition are key to the prevention of much cancer. These days ya gotta eat your greens and grains!

So even the experts can change their minds….

Finally, it seems that environmental factors only really get attention when there are clusters of rare cancers.

Note: The site has a one-time offer of three free articles or documents by creating a new account today.

Senate environment committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) are working on legislation that would give EPA and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) a major new role helping local health agencies investigate and address cancer clusters and communicate risks to local residents.

Right now the federal Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ) and Department of Health and Human Services ( HHS ) usually don’t get involved absent a request from a state.

“This effort is aimed at finding ways to bring in more federal resources more rapidly to help protect people, especially little children,” said Nelson, who’s also expected on Friday to announce he’s partnering with U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer on new legislation to do the same.

Title: A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to authorize the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to conduct a research program on endocrine disruption, to prevent and reduce the production of, and exposure to, chemicals that can undermine the development of children before they are born and cause lifelong impairment to their health and function, and for other purposes.

Both versions of the bill were introduced on Dec. 3, 2009, and were referred to committees in their respective chambers.